weasels fighting in a hole

None of these exit strategies will work for the simple reason that they are based on an unrealisable ambition: to have the Iraqi cake and eat it. All the Bush and Blair strategies are based on maintaining a pro-US regime in Baghdad. -- Sami Ramadani, Guardian.

All of the U.S. papers have been touting the civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq, and some of them have even stopped and listened, with headshaking American grins, to certain indications that the natives blame the Americans. Well, that takes the cake. Really. We are only there to help the little people. This is so evidently outside the realm of reality that reality itself must be censored. So, as Ramadi points out, while the Americans view themselves as standing between Iraq and civil war, there is the little business of what the Iraqis are doing themselves.

From the Guardian:

“It has not been Sunni religious symbols that hundreds of thousands of angry marchers protesting at the bombing of the shrine have targeted, but US flags. The slogan that united them on Wednesday was: " Kalla, kalla Amrica, kalla kalla lill-irhab " - no to America, no to terrorism. The Shia clerics most listened to by young militants swiftly blamed the occupation for the bombing. They included Moqtada al-Sadr; Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon; Ayatollah Khalisi, leader of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress; and Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader. Along with Grand Ayatollah Sistani, they also declared it a grave "sin" to attack Sunnis - as did all the Sunni clerics about attacks on Shias. Sadr was reported by the BBC as calling for revenge on Sunnis - in fact, he said "no Sunni would do this" and called for revenge on the occupation.”

Why Americans think they can spend three years in a foreign country killing the country’s people at times and places of their choosing and still be voted king and queen of the prom is a question for psychoanalysis. Look under “narcissism, terminal.” There was a very amusing bit in Crooked Timber the other day, where they listed the Instapundit’s pronunciations about Sadr. From 2003 until the end of 2004, it was all downhill for Sadr as the good news just poured in from Iraq. A sad spectacle, actually. To make a zombie, all you have to do is cut away the ability to make any scenarios except those that reproduce the glorious occupation of Germany, circa 1945. And that, of course, is where the zombies have come to rest – the computer game generation playing the greatest generation.

The disasters of the Bush foreign policy do seem to be piling up at a more rapid rate, lately. There has always been an air of the juggling act about that policy – the throwing up of as many knives and plates in the air as possible. Since these are grossly uneducated jugglers, jugglers who have only read the first chapter of the juggling textbook – the one that says first you throw things up in the air – watching them stand around while the plates and knives head downward is painful. Adding to the suspense, of course, are those audience members who keep saying that since the plates and knives haven’t yet hit the heads of the juggler, it just may be that the laws of gravity are suspended – in fact, we haven’t heard the good news about that law yet. After a while, one’s astonishment turns into a sort of cognitive fury, a neural heart attack.

ps -forget the neural heart attack and cue exhausted laughter. From the NYT today:

"Rather than see a collapse or a setback, I think in some ways, you can see an affirmation that the approach we've been taking has worked," said Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman. "You've got political leadership acting together on behalf of the common good, and you've got security forces demonstrating that capability and a responsibility as a national entity that we've been working to develop and that has now been put to the test and, I think, is proving successful."

Ereli was, I believe, the same person who praised the american airline attack plan (aaap), devised by the Rebel in Chief himself in the summer of 2001, for being tremendously successful on 9/11/01, as the WTC towers successfully intercepted those hijacked planes. "The adminstrations plan to effectively use our skyscraper as the first line of defense proved its worth today, as we march immer forward from success to success under our Leader."